


marshlights

by greywash



Series: Spring Break Creative Calisthenics [5]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, F/F, Grief, Mourning, Multi, Queer Friendship, Queer History, Queer love, Spring Break Creative Calisthenics, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 15:07:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6333826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy knows why she goes to Brooklyn, of course—by and large she doesn’t have the luxury of successful self-deception—and visiting the Barnes household might be a bit harder to explain, but not very.</p>
            </blockquote>





	marshlights

**Author's Note:**

> Over spring break, [I am asking for some prompts on Tumblr](http://fizzygins.tumblr.com/post/141318279512/okay-so-i-have-been-having-an-awful-time-with) to help me shake out the writerly cobwebs. An anonymouse requested: 'for the writing prompts: "electric", anything in the captain america universe. \o/'
> 
>  **Warnings for disturbing content**. My full warning policy is in my [profile](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile#warnings); if you have any questions, please feel free to [email me](mailto:greywash@gmail.com).

She knows why she goes to Brooklyn, of course—by and large she doesn’t have the luxury of successful self-deception—and visiting the Barnes household might be a bit harder to explain, but not very. It’s terrible. She confesses she hadn’t truly expected it to be, but the parents are weathered and roughened by loss, and the daughters, who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two, turn out to be a series smaller copies of their brother, dark brown hair and huge blue eyes with just a single switch flipped somewhere, and then ordered by size. Peggy had loved James, in part because Steve loved James and Peggy loved Steve, but she’d thought, in that absent irrelevant way reserved for wartime, that she’d’ve been awfully fond of him even without the mediating presence of Steve’s influence: both outsiders together, wearing uniforms made for other bodies, play-acting the people signified by their skin. She liked James; still, she hadn’t ever fancied she felt even a fraction of Steve’s loss. _Like a brother_ , she might have said: but of course, faced again with the reality of the death of a brother and a son, that particular white lie becomes an unforgivable insult, a volley in a war in which Peggy herself has already surrendered her guns.

Halfway through the most agonizing cup of coffee Peggy’s had since the end of the war, the eldest girl, wearing the remnants of a WASP’s uniform she no longer has any use for with her hair frizzing out around the edges of a kerchief printed with poppies, rubs her hand over her forehead in a gesture that makes time stretch and warp, dizzying; then pushes to her feet and climbs out the front door onto the porch, where she sits with her back to the window in her slacks and white blouse and smokes cigarette after cigarette, her kerchief bent down, thin shoulders hunched together. Peggy continues to condole with the family. It feels unreal. After the last thick, choking mouthful of the nut-and-raisin cake Mrs. Barnes had insisted Peggy take, when the father and the other two girls have given her their thanks and sidled, pale-faced, upstairs, Peggy follows Rebecca out into the lingering summer-evening smell of rubbish and evaporating petrol, and sits down beside her on the little brick ledge. Rebecca offers her a cigarette, which Peggy accepts; then lights it for her, leaving a smear of waxy lipstick on the end. 

Rebecca smokes steadily, without much haste or any particular enjoyment, another cigarette and a half before Peggy’s finished her one, and then says, “Do you want to get out of here?” and Peggy finds that she does.

In a bar a quarter-mile from the Navy Yard they drink a series of shots of something halfway between vinegar and lighter fluid, served to them by a six and a half foot fairy with arms like tree trunks and perfect Veronica Lake hair. They twirl a heavily made up art student and two WACs and each other around the dance floor, break up a fight between a barrel-chested docker and a lanky Brooklyn College sort with a profile movie stars would kill for, kiss in the corner in the dark; they sneak out the bathroom window when the police come, and then with a bottle Peggy doesn’t remember (presumably stolen) swinging loose between her fingers Rebecca walks, walks out of the bar across wavering heat rising from damp streets to the bridge onto the bridge to the middle of the bridge with Peggy just behind her, tingling all over; to stand at the edge, look out over the water; their city, tonight, lit up and twinkling, rolling out like the sea as they uncap the bottle, trade foul throat-searing sips. Peggy stands beside Rebecca with their elbows not-touching dizzy from the liquor and an ache in her chest that seeps down into her bones: it feels like a wake. It _is_ a wake, she knows, low down and painful, it’s the wake that they all of them couldn’t have: in agonizingly pristine middle-class Brooklyn row houses or army camps or the bombed-out rubble of Blitz-razed pubs; places they all fit in fine and none of them ever knew how to own, the places that all of them needed to be.

“Thanks,” Rebecca says, quietly, and rubs the back of the hand that isn’t holding the bottle against her forehead again. 

Inside Peggy’s skull, swimming and heavy, the effect is bludgeoning, purple and black: “James did that, too,” she says, and when Rebecca looks up, Peggy mirrors the gesture back. For an instant Rebecca’s face crumples: a strange, imploded sort of expression, before she forces it back and stills her face and lets a torrent of air out of her narrow-ribbed lungs; _hurricanes_ , Peggy thinks. _Typhoons_. _Gales_.

Some time later, Rebecca says, “They would’ve forced us out.”

“Yes,” Peggy agrees.

“They would’ve sent him home,” Rebecca says; and Peggy nods.

“No guns,” Peggy murmurs, “no bombs, no soldiers—home,” with her mind lit up by the broad heavy shoulders of the first constable in through the door; she says, “where he would’ve been happy, and safe,” and beside her with her bare arms coming up in gooseflesh in the wind off the water, Rebecca gives a raw, wild laugh.

They stand on the bridge side by side in the sharp waterfront breeze with the ocean of lights of the city spread everywhere around them and vast black and sparkling stretch of the universe up above, leaning over the railing and surveying their kingdom as the lights ring and shiver below. The sun will come up, soon. The bottle finds its way back between Peggy’s fingers. She catches her thumb on the peeling edge of the label, then lifts it up over the side of the bridge. 

“To,” she tries, but her throat closes up.

“To Steve,” Rebecca says, after a moment; then, softer: “To Michael.”

Peggy forces herself: jerks out a nod. “To our boys,” she manages, finally, and takes a swig that burns like acetone. She can’t bring herself to say anything else. 

Instead, she turns and hands the bottle back. Fumbling with the neck Rebecca looks beautiful and familiar-unfamiliar and painfully, oppressively young; Peggy watches her helplessly, this person who is not the person who was loved by a person that Peggy loved, all muddled up with the alchemical transference of person to person into person that is stretching Peggy’s hastily tacked seams, this grown-up too-young girl with her white blouse now growing dingy with washing and her repurposed General’s Pants and a loud kerchief tied up around her hair, red with poppies, standing straight on the Brooklyn Bridge, incandescently brave: _the end of the war made manifest_ , Peggy is thinking as Rebecca lifts the bottle up and says, “To Bucky,” and then bursts into tears. 

Rebecca is an ugly crier, red-faced and splotchy and squelchy; Peggy, she knows, is too. Peggy has a handkerchief in her pocket, still pressed, unused. She steps closer with her arm circling up around Rebecca’s back like she had circled James encircling her, with the lights encircling them, spreading out around them, growing out of their bodies like water lilies in summer, rampant, unchecked things that tangled and choked and bloomed and burst, winding her up with him up with Steve up with Jones and with Dum-Dum and Morita and with Rebecca across an ocean and with Michael beneath the dirt; and on the Brooklyn Bridge past midnight, late August, 1945, Peggy thinks: _I’ve never felt such joy before, in all of my life_ ; and dries Rebecca’s cheeks.


End file.
